Down the Darkest Street: A Pete Fernandez Mystery

At the start of Segura’s muddled sequel to 2013’s Silent City, a drunken Pete Fernandez, former copy editor for the Miami Times, is enduring a thorough beating in an alleyway, and his fortunes only go downhill from there. Life for Pete consists of attending AA meetings, working a part-time job in a used bookstore, and allowing his former fiancée, Emily, to bunk at his house while she works out her problems with her cheating husband, Rick. When Rick pays a call at Pete’s house looking for Emily, Rick asks Pete to tell Emily that a friend of hers, Alice, is missing. Pete and Kathy Bentley, a former newspaper colleague, join forces to search for Alice. In the process, Pete and Kathy learn that other young women have been kidnapped off the Miami streets. Their mutilated corpses are clearly the work of a serial killer, who soon targets both Pete and Emily. Segura offers little in the way of originality in this haphazardly plotted, often clumsily written yarn. [em](Apr.) [/em]